Silliman's Blog

A weblog focused on contemporary poetry and poetics.

Saturday, September 13, 2003

My piece
Wednesday on H.D., Noveliste, has me
thinking about the further question of how form, genre & chance impact our
lives. Several things I saw this past week reinforced this mulling-over
process. One was an article in The
Guardian, which I actually suspect may be an adapted introduction from his
book, by Salam
Pax. Pax, a Baghdad architecture student, created a personal weblog in English only to
discover that it had become one of the most widely read “inside views” of the
last days of Saddam & the first days of George & Rummy, a process that
turned him, to his considerable discomfort (and undoubtedly much risk), into

·An
author

·An
“expert” on the Iraqi experience

Pax
professes to be neither. But excerpts of his blog can be had now in book form
in the U.K. & Grove Press will release a U.S. edition in October.

As someone who
has edited Davis, a brilliant but
exceptionally undisciplined author, the prospect of a novel, a project
completely in keeping with Davis’ uniquely British mode of Los Angeles post-Marxism, just makes my eyes
dilate, nostrils flare & chest constrict. This I have to see.

Mortensen
has seen his own public notoriety skyrocket of late. In addition to his career-making
role in the Ring trilogy, anyone who
saw his turn as the painter boyfriend in A
Perfect Murder & realized that those were in fact his paintings will understand Mortensen takes these other genres
seriously, however variously he may succeed or not in each. Unlike, say, Jewel
or Leonard Nimoy, Mortensen is at least a serious
artist whose day job happens to be in film, not unlike Michael Lally or Harry Northrup.

The third
is a DVD I saw the other night, Genghis Blues, a 1999 documentary
starring two musicians, Paul Pena
& Kongar-olOndar. If you saw the
list of CD stacks I have in my study, you know that one stack focuses on
blues & another on world music, with a fair amount of Tuvan
throat singing in the latter pile. Genghis
Blues is one of the very few places in which these two interests
converge.

Throat
singing or khoomei is a harmonic singing tradition in
which the performer sings two, sometimes even as many as four, notes at one
time. Different versions of this tradition exist in Tuva, Mongolia & Tibet. Pena, the blind-since-childhood
blues singer who wrote “Jet Airliner,” a hit song for Steve “Guitar” Miller in
the mid-1970s, discovered & taught himself not only this exceptionally
difficult method of singing, but, in order to do so, had to learn at least the
rudiments of the Tuvan language. And since there are
exactly zero Tuvan-English dictionaries in the world,
he had to learn Russian just to get to the Tuvan. (Pena may be an almost archetypal example of the
starving blues artist, but he is also very obviously nobody’s fool.)

Tuva, once the
nation of Tannu
Tuva, is now one of the RussianRepublics & is located along the
northwest border of Mongolia. It’s a state of just 300,000
people the size of North Dakota & a large portion of the
population remains nomadic, raising camels & horses & rather furry
looking Asian cows. Even though Genghis Khan’s top general was Tuvan, the history of the nation is that of so many
landlocked cultures, shifting from parent state to parent state, spending
relatively little historical time with any kind of autonomy.

After
Pena’s wife died of renal failure in 1991, the bluesman has lived a pretty
hand-to-mouth existence in San Francisco’s Mission District. He had
discovered throat singing over a shortwave radio broadcast, but it had taken
him years to find a recording. But from that point, it appears to have taken
him only a week or so to actually learn the process of singing in multiple
notes. Having learned this extremely rare singing style, Pena managed to get
himself invited to a Tuvan throat singing competition
in Kyzyl, the capital of Tuva. Genghis Blues is a documentary of that trip, where Pena cemented
his friendship with Kongar-olOndar,
the “Elvis Presley of throat singing,” won two awards in the competition &
found himself in a place, literally, where his skills & talents could be
completely appreciated, a mere 12,000 miles from home. A fairly rudimentary,
even crude, documentary, Blues was
nominated for an Oscar and won several film festival awards largely on the
basis of its improbable, infectious content, fabulous music & the openness
of its two main characters to go beyond their intellectual & cultural
borders.

In every
one of these instances, questions of social framing can be raised in many
different ways:

·Is
Salam Pax an architecture student who writes, or vice verse?

·Is
Viggo Mortensen an actor, poet, painter, photographer?

·Is
Mike Davis a novelist?

·At
what level is Paul Pena a Tuvan singer?

There are
artists who have been successful in more than one field, such as Abigail Child, but historically they’re rare.
Bruce Andrews likes to note that every nice thing that has ever been written
about him in the New York Times has
been about his scores for Sally Silvers’ dance, never once about his poetry.
Ned Rorem, a composer more widely known for his memoirs, simply demonstrates
that this phenomenon works in both directions.

What
conclusions might one draw from this? Only that there are no guarantees – what
makes an artist successful in one genre may have no bearing whatsoever on another.
And there certainly are instances in which artists commit a larger part of
their live to an endeavor that, like Hilda Doolittle’s novels, gets far less
public recognition than some other form. Gertrude Stein had something like this
happen to her when The Autobiography of
Alice B. Toklas, clearly written to be a best seller, recast Stein’s public
image dramatically.

One can
come up with even more complicated configurations. Stan Rice, when still an extremely ambitious up-&-coming academic
poet/professor, encouraged his wife Anne to write. The phenomenal
financial success of her vampire novels eliminated any economic need on his
part &, after he left his job at San FranciscoState, Stan developed into a kitschy sort of painter who
actually refused to sell his work. After publishing two books of poetry in two
years in the mid-1970s – we shared one publisher, The Figures – he only
published four others over the next 25 years. Anne’s publisher printed the last
three volumes, which gave them broader distribution than even most School of Quietude poets can hope for. And frankly
Stan’s skill as a poet disguised his sentimentality in a way that his paintings
could not. Yet by the time he passed away last year, the only context remaining
for either of his media was the one created by her writing. It may have been a
very comfortable sort of marooning, but if ever there was a man who needed to
invite other poets into his room of one’s own, it was Stan.

Friday, September 12, 2003

Coromandel is an Indian term referring
originally to the coastal region of Southeastern India along the Bay of Bengal – essentially the coast facing out
towards Sri Lanka – the term derived apparently from Cholomandalam, the land of the Chola, the
Indian dynasty that ruled, between the 9th and 12th
centuries, what is now Tamil Nadu. The word Coromandel
was generalized by the British into something akin to coastal, which meaning then spread to other parts of the empire,
notably New Zealand. Somewhere in the process the word
also became a popular name for hotels, though so far as I can make out, it’s
neither a corporate chain in the sense, say, of Westin, nor a term with the
concept linguistically implicit, the way Patel,
a Gujurati term for innkeeper, has become a surname for so many in the
Indian diaspora.

Coromandel also is the name for Thomas Meyer’s newest book, a 64-page poem
issued as a fat chapbook from La Révolution Opossum in skanky Austin, TX. This is the poem I referenced in
passing in
a discussion of the format of Kenneth Warren’s House Organ, which had printed an excerpt from “Book Two.” My
footnote read “Suggesting of course the presence of
‘Book One’ & the possibility of others. Is there a new Tom Meyer long poem
in the works?” As it turns out, I was half right – there was such a poem in the
works, but, interestingly enough, no Book One. Therein lies a tale.

Meyer
could rightly be characterized as a 3rd generation projectivist
poet, having studied with Robert Kelly at Bard & having
lived at least part of the year within driving distance of Black Mountain
College itself for 30 years whilst living with one of its best known grads, the
peripatetic logodaedalist himself, Jonathon Williams. As is the case with the
third generation anything, the hard won victories of the forefathers (&,
save for Levertov, fathers is exactly what they were) become as self-evident
& fully absorbed as the sun, enabling the writer to do whatever it was he
intended all along. Thus if the beloved moment of projectivism occurs at the
end of the line, that point at which meanings & rhythms turn & twist,
Meyer has virtually never written a line anywhere in his work that was
unconscious or poorly executed. But at the same, he also has never written a
line where the break itself was the point.

Literary
history being the history not of poems & prose, but of change, third
generation writers often go underappreciated even as they produce some of the
very best & most satisfying works of their respective periods. At least the
NY School’s third class had some geographic sense of cohesion – though look at
the history of Actualism
to see what might happen in its absence – but after the transformation of Caterpillar into not a butterfly, but Sulfur, projectivism went for over a
decade really without a journal or press seriously devoted to its development
& evolution, before it began to show up again as one of several focuses for
Ed Foster’s Talisman, & then with sharper focus in House Organ’s rough-&-ready format & finally the superb
volumes being put forward by Devin Johnston’s Flood Editions. It’s an integral
part of the Skanky Possum program as well.

Structurally,
Coromandel has five sections, each
shorter than the one that preceded it. The first, the aforementioned “Book II”
(19 pages in this chapbook), is composed of unrhymed couplets. The second
section, “This is the House” (17 pages), is a long single stanza, individual
lines generally running anywhere from one to nine words. The third, “Quincunx”
(14 pages), is composed of five line stanzas. The fourth, “Part 4” (6 pages in
this format, although it would telescope down considerably with a wider page
that didn’t require so many hanging indents), treats each long line as an
individual stanza. The last, “Trikona” (2 pages), has eight three-line stanzas.
Thus all but one section alludes in its title to some aspect of number. But the
“II” in ”Book II,” if it has any referential or formal meaning seems to point
not to the position in the sequence but counterintuitively to lines per stanza.
Ditto “Quincunx” and “Trikona.” Yet “Part 4” is, in fact the fourth part. And
that section reflects no correlation between number & internal form.

Walter
Benjamin’s distinctions between titles – terms or phrases that “name the entire
work” – and captions – terms or phrases that point into a work & thus
organize our reception – is worth considering here, because at some level
Meyer’s work is doing something different altogether. Just as the “II” is not a
way to characterize the formal structure of the first section of the poem,
neither does “Quincunx” really function to identify the 102 five-line stanzas
that fall under it. “Trikona,” Sanskrit for triangle, has its origin as a term
in yoga, the theory of charkas and Indian abstract design. Fiveness & threeness
are as much a part of these words’ connotative undercoating as they are of
their denotative functionality. Each title stands rather as if at an angle with
regards to the work it envelopes or at least touches.

Meyer
is a poet who values precision, perhaps above any other aspect of his writing.
& Coromandel is the project of his that comes closest to a classic
configuration of the New Sentence. Just as the New Sentence functions not only
by what it may say but even more by
what gets configured in the blank territory between sentences, Meyer here creates
a work that comes alive through the constant deferral, reflection &
refraction of meaning. “Not place, but position,” as he says at the end of this
passage in “This is the house”:

A train passes.
Stars

order

love’s

numbers.

Apparently us.

Measure.

Of all this.

Nothing but

sun

above trees.

Horus sucks his

thumb.

They gather the
dark in baskets

the livelong day.

Maple leaf. Angel’s
wing.

Feather.

This book’s leaves

fall from trees.

Not place, but
position.

Periplum was the term Pound borrowed
from Greek sailors, negotiating a territory of constant reconfiguration.
Language likewise operates through a continual process of differentiation. The
space between words is, in fact, a distancing effect. Meyer throughout this
book is identifying exactnesses.

As
the passage above suggests, Meyer prefers his effects to be subtle, the shifts
gradual rather than angular. The gap between sentences in “Measure. / Of all
this.” is hardly a canyon. It’s not that Meyer can’t or won’t move toward an
extreme – “Giordano Bruno’s charred body rises in my sleep” – but the reader
does not get the cognitive whiplash that is sometimes a feature of langpo. The
result is closer to the music of a Satie than, say, a Wagner. Or Johnny Rotten.
Or perhaps I should say simply that Meyer seems to have located the space in
the projectivist tradition that comes closest to the poetry of a writer like
Forrest Gander or Ann Lauterbach. In this sense, Coromandel feels very much to me like a poetry for grown ups.
Which, for example, Rimbaud is not.

If
I have a hesitation or aesthetic difference with this book, it’s only in its
sequence of successively shorter segments, a movement that grates against my
own bias for a form that spirals from the innermost part of the mollusk toward
its outer rim. Meyer’s process in this sense feels anti-narrative in a way that
I’m not certain he intends. I could, I suspect, make an argument for the logic
of it, not unlike the way the titles deploy number. Or like Zeno’s footsteps
growing successively shorter on their way to the door. Yet no amount of
intellectual justification will ever fully mute that tiny scratching on the
blackboard of my soul. Underneath this complex & quite gorgeous tour de
force, I hear it still.

Wednesday, September 10, 2003

Just about
everyone I know thinks of Jack Kerouac as a novelist who wrote poetry. But what about Gilbert
Sorrentino? Before Mulligan
Stew and the other long prose fictions that made Sorrentino justly famous
as a novelist, he was a successful poet (and a superb critic of
poetry). Along with the then-LeRoi Jones, the always-on-the-road Paul
Blackburn, and youngsters George Economou, Rochelle
Owens, Robert
Kelly
& Clayton Eshleman, Sorrentino was part of Projectivism’s presence in &
around Manhattan throughout the 1960s & ‘70s. Sorrentino’s Selected Poems covers the period
1958-1980. But I’m not aware if there has been much, if any, poetry since. It’s
as though the man had one successful career & then chose to follow it with
another, very different such career. Not unlike Bill Bradley, an athlete, then
a politician.

Another poet
with an even more ambiguous relation to these genres has been Toby
Olson, again a second generation Projectivist. Because he’s published in
both forms throughout his life, I’ve always suspected that his work has been
underestimated in each form. The very same silliness that bedevils the
bookstore clerk who cannot decide whether Vikram Seth’sGolden
Gate is fiction or poetry*, let alone Lyn Hejinian’s My Life, plays out in the minds of readers more generally when it
comes to considering the lifework of different authors. Case in point: Hilda
Doolittle.

Almost
everyone thinks of Doolittle as a poet who also wrote some fiction, as well as
translations & memoirs. Yet H.D. published, for all extents and purposes,
just a dozen or so books of poetry during her lifetime, going long periods
between volumes after the appearance of her first Collected Poems in 1925. And that number shrinks if you treat Trilogy as one book, instead of three.
During this long productive career – just under half a century – Doolittle also
wrote 19 novels and collections of stories, according to Susan Stanford
Friedman’s 1987 chronology of H.D.’s writing, published in the special issue of
Sagetrieb devoted to Doolittle’s
work. They include the following:

·Paint It Today, novel

·Asphodel, novel

·Pilate’s Wife, novel

·Palimpsest, novel (interlocking stories)

·Nike, novel

·Hedylus, novel

·HER, novel (published as HERmione)

·Narthex, novella

·The Usual Star, stories

·Kora and Ka, novellas

·Nights, novella

·The Hedgehog, novel

·The Seven, stories

·Bid Me to Live, novel

·Majic Ring, novel

·The Sword Went Out to Sea (Synthesis
of a Dream), novel

·White Rose and the Red, novel

·The Mystery, novel

·Magic Mirror, novel

Not all of
these novels ever made it into print. Friedman’s note for Nike simply reads “Destroyed.” Biographer Guest politely notes that
“Hipparchia: War Rome (Circa 75 B.C.)” has “none of
the polish or professionalism” of H.D.’s later work,
and I would pass a similar judgment on Paint
It Today. Friedman lists Pilate’s
Wife as “submitted and rejected,” & White
Rose and the Red as “probably rejected.” Yet 19 booklength works over a
35-year span (H.D. appears to have begun writing fiction in 1921, after her
life began to stabilize somewhat with the presence of Bryher; the final item, Magic Mirror, was written in the
mid-1950s) demonstrates a considerable emphasis, a commitment of time &
effort. Indeed, between the first Collected
Poems in 1925 and her next book of poetry, Red Roses for Bronze, in 1931, Doolittle produced seven novels
& collections of stories, plus the verse drama Hippolytus Temporizes plus her work on the film Borderline.

One could
make the case that Doolittle was, in fact, a novelist – tho not a successful
one – who wrote poetry at least as much as she was a poet who wrote fiction.
While that may seem like a difference within a distinction (& vice versa),
it has, I suspect, real consequences in terms of how H.D. saw herself &
thus how she envisioned her career as author. Did she feel satisfied? Was she pleased at what she had accomplished? These
are, I think, legitimate questions. During a poet’s life, they have everything
to do with how the writer decides what’s
next, and even how to proceed. At
one level, the writer in me would love for an Emily Dickinson, say, to
understand the breadth & depth of her achievement, the power of her impact
on the world. At another, younger writers are constantly confronted with
options, nearly every one of which is an incentive to stop writing poetry. What
if, for example, Jack Spicer had finished his detective novel & it had
proven to be a best-seller, followed with a major motion picture? What if, in
precisely the other direction, Trout
Fishing in Americahad not been so fabulously successful? Would Richard
Brautigan still be alive today? Would there be a west coast tradition of the humorous
lyric as widespread as that which flowed from the New YorkSchool? So many what-ifs flow out of such a distinction: was a H.D. a novelist who wrote poetry?

In
practice, I haven’t seen anything yet to suggest that this is how Doolittle saw
herself, albeit I am still acquainting myself with the territory & I have a
long way still to go. Nonetheless what I want to be conscious of, at least for
today, is how the H.D. we know / I know is a construct. That is, we define her
as the poet & in so doing condition many of our responses to new
information, setting our expectations accordingly. The fiction that is in
print, such as it is, for example, appears to have been published to fill out
the oeuvre of the poet, not because anyone thought that it might transform a
history of the novel (although, in fact, it is
historically important to the degree that H.D. was writing overtly lesbian
fiction at time when this was hardly done at all, & only at some risk). Which is to say that all of the reasons for publishing H.D.’s
fiction have little or nothing to do with its actual quality as fiction.

Tuesday, September 09, 2003

There is an
interesting image in Barbara Guest’s excellent biography of Hilda Doolittle, Herself Defined, of imagism as a
movement after Ezra Pound had moved on to join Wyndham Lewis in declaring
Vorticism. The image Guest leaves the reader with is one of a lone major Imagiste, H.D., a second-but-inferior
entrepreneurial huckster in Amy Lowell, and a handful of second-tier poets of
the likes of John Gould Fletcher and Richard Aldington,
having to carry on with no clear sense of direction. Guest outlines the ways in
which the Imagism of these latter poets was invariably compromised – either too
Georgian or just too muddled. The implication is that once Pound turned his
attention elsewhere, Imagism lost its “head.” Ultimately, and Guest is fairly
explicit about this, there would be only one “true” Imagist: H.D.

Which
opens, for me, the deeper question of what an –ism can possibly be. The idea of
poetry organized in some fashion around a common purpose necessarily implies
the possibility of shared motives. That’s a concept that comes more directly
from French painting (& secondarily French symbolist poetry) than it does
the tradition of Anglo-American letters. Still there are sporadic foretastes,
including the mid-19th century squabbling between the Young
Americans and the anglophiles of the School of Quietude. Underlying this concept is some
sense of how a “common purpose” might be characterized. Does it require, for
example, a defining statement of principles – a manifesto for want of a better
term – and the adoption of a name? Guest is clear that Pound, for example, was
less of a namer of movements than he was an
appropriator of names, such as T.E. Hume’s imagism or Lewis’ Vorticism. Even
Objectivism, although Guest doesn’t mention it, might be described in these
same terms – a name & an accompanying statement of principles, primarily
put forward (at least in 1932) for the purposes of marketing. The need thus was
external to the poetry, indeed was imposed on the poets by Zukofsky only at the
insistence of Harriet Monroe.

An –ism of
this order strikes me as being essentially hollow, aimed less at the poets than
at some externalized audience. Contrast this with, for example, the most
pronounced ism of the 1950s, Projectivism. While Olson, Creeley, Dorn, Duncan
& Sorrentino all wrote substantive works of critical writing – and some of
Olson’s in particular embody the rhetoric of a manifesto – they’re really aimed
at one another. What we are reading in their works is much more of an internal
discussion – they’re goading one another to write better & to take greater
chances in their work. One sees this also, I think, in the relatively few
critical works to emerge from the New YorkSchool (O’Hara’s “Personism”) or the
so-called Beat Scene (primarily Kerouac’s statements on prosody &
spontaneous writing). Indeed, the Projectivists never once in their writings
ever called themselves by that name & the Beats were accorded that moniker
by a San Francisco gossip columnist, Herb Caen. “Personism,” the only
true –ism of that decade, employed that term strictly as a joke. Even the term New YorkSchool, which was employed only by its
second generation, was used half as a joke. While the marketing aspect of a
group brand was not altogether absent with the NY School, any more than it was
with the Beats, the focus was much more decisively
around the question of internal discourse. The –isms of the 1950s were thus
more communities in their orientation than the ones of the teens or the 1930s.
And, no surprise, it was this aspect of these “movements” that I think appealed
most to the poets who came to be known in the 1970s as language poets.

It’s not
that Pound wasn’t interested in communicating with other poets, but his rather
frenetic social organizing never moved toward a community because that was
never its purpose.

Other Books in Print

Memoirs & Collaborations

Criticism

Anthology

Ron Silliman was born in Pasco, Washington, although his parents stayed there just long enough for his mother to learn that one could step on field mice while walking barefoot through the snow to the outhouse, and for his father to walk away from a plane crash while smuggling alcohol into a dry county. Silliman has written and edited over 30 books, most recently Revelator from BookThug, and had his poetry and criticism translated into 14 languages. Silliman was a 2012 Kelly Writers House Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, and the 2010 recipient of the Levinson Prize,from the Poetry Foundation. His sculpture Poetry (Bury Neon) is permanently on display in the transit center of Bury, Lancashire, and he has a plaque in the walk dedicated to poetry in his home town of Berkeley, although he now lives in Chester County, PA. In 2015, Silliman is teaching at Haverford College & theUniversity of Pennsylvania.